Antitrust Division Criminal Cases Filed, Fiscal Year 2021

New criminal antitrust cases — price-fixing, bid-rigging, market allocation — the Division filed against companies and individuals.

Criminal antitrust cases are a low-volume, high-severity category, and the count in any given fiscal year is disproportionately driven by the number of active cartel investigations reaching the charging stage rather than by any broad measure of anticompetitive conduct in the economy. A single large international cartel investigation — auto parts, financial benchmarks, generic pharmaceuticals — can generate dozens of individual and corporate charges over several fiscal years as it works through the Division's leniency and cooperation pipeline, which means a single year's filed-case count is best read as one data point in a multi-year investigation cycle, not an independent signal.

Duration for criminal antitrust cases is long by design: cartel conduct is covert, and building a chargeable case typically requires grand jury subpoenas, cooperating-witness development through the Division's leniency program, and often years of investigation before the first charge is filed — meaning the filed-case count in a given fiscal year reflects investigative work that began years earlier. For a company under an active grand jury investigation, the realistic planning horizon extends well past the point of first learning about the investigation, with individual executives facing personal criminal exposure on a separate and often longer timeline than the corporate resolution.

For insurers and funders, criminal antitrust exposure is a compounding risk: a criminal conviction or guilty plea creates a nearly automatic predicate for follow-on civil treble-damages litigation from purchasers and competitors, which means the criminal case's resolution date is frequently the start of a second, separate multi-year civil exposure period rather than the end of the matter. Modeling criminal antitrust risk in isolation from the follow-on civil exposure it generates understates the total duration and cost of resolution significantly.

Resolution paths split between negotiated guilty pleas, which resolve the large majority of criminal antitrust matters, particularly for cooperating defendants under the Division's leniency program, and the smaller share that proceed to trial — typically individual defendants with strong personal incentive to contest liability even where the corporate entity has already pleaded guilty. Criterica Intelligence frames criminal antitrust filings as the leading edge of a longer risk arc that includes follow-on civil exposure, for the companies, insurers, and funders that need to see the full cycle rather than a single fiscal year's charging count.

Figures on this page are drawn from official agency publications, cited individually below, and reflect the agency’s own reporting as of the date shown for each figure. They are not Criterica Intelligence model outputs, are not predictions, and are not a measure of any party’s legal exposure or liability. Agencies periodically revise prior-year figures; where a revision is known, both figures are shown with their sources. This page does not constitute legal, investment, or compliance advice.